On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 04:23:12PM +0100, David Kastrup wrote: > Graham Percival <gra...@percival-music.ca> writes: > > > The suggestion that a .ly file would somehow be a derivative work > > of lilypond is ridiculous. > > Depends on how interlocked and crossdependent it is with internals of > Lilypond and whether or not stuff has been cross-copied.
If there's no allowances for "interoperability", and if the amount of "interlocked-ness" (how do we measure this?) of articulate.ly means that it's a derivative work, then any serious use of scheme functions in lilypond would automatically mean that the music must be GPLv3 or later. That's crazy. If that's actually true -- which I doubt -- then I would argue in the strongest possible terms that we should add a "using the lilypond scheme API does not require that the music is placed under the GPLv3", similar to our font exception. My personal stake is that I'm using scheme to extract music events from lilypond for Vivi. I was planning on placing Vivi under the GPLv3, but I *don't* like being forced to do so. If using lilypond scheme actually means that -- and if we don't add an exception to allow the use of scheme code and calling ly:music-functions in our own .ly files -- then I'll seriously look at dropping lilypond input and use musicxml instead. > A .ly file that represents some score certainly is separate from > Lilypond. A .ly file that is intended to run as an integrated part of > Lilypond when typesetting, however: I would not be able to call that a > separate work without analyzing the source. Please examine articulate.ly in detail and give your opinion about whether it is legal for Peter (and NICTA) to place that work under the GPLv2. This is a very serious allegation, and I think we should clear it up immediately, before even thinking about any patches. I will admit that one comment in articulate.ly says: % Gradually speed up a piece of music. Stolen from the feather % code in % the Lilypond base. % Overflows moment and causes infinite Lilypond loop, or segv % --- DON'T USE #(define (ac:accel music factor) Since articulate.ly was primarily written in 2008, I would expect this to have come from the GPLv2 version of lilypond (as it was until Fall 2009... actually, the stable 2.12 version is still under GPLv2). And it that "DON'T USE" comment is accurate, then perhaps the entire function should be removed to avoid confusion. > > articulate.ly is a 668-line .ly file containing a bunch of scheme. > > It is absolutely not a derivative work of lilypond. > > That is not the question. Isn't that precisely the question? You wrote: "It is not even clear that Peter can release/distribute it under GPL version 2.0 unless it will work unmodified with a version of Lilypond released under GPL version 2.0" If articulate.ly is not a derivative work, then he (and/or his employer) are free to choose any license they wish. If, for some reason, articulate.ly *is* a derivative, then he (and/or his employer) are *not* free to choose any license. At the moment, I don't care about the patch. I'm shocked at the suggestion that Peter's research might be illegal, and I would like you to clarify this as soon as possible. Please example articulate.ly in detail, and give your opinion as to whether it consititutes a derivate work. - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
